School (II)

This is what I read in a German online newspaper [Die Welt] today:

In the Culpeper County ISD the “The Diary of Anne Frank” has been deleted from the reading-list and has also been removed from the schools’ libraries because it is “too sexually explicit”, as it – among others – contains the word “vagina”! [More here >>]

That, too, is America – the country in which the First Amendment [the right to free speech] is so highly regarded that, e.g., in TV spots during election campaigns plain and simply slanderous hate harangues can be found and that from here Nazi propaganda can be mailed worldwide.

One of the principle differences between European countries and the U.S. is that U.S. society, being much larger and much more geographically diverse, is not nearly as “unified” as most European societies. Furthermore, our central government is the creation of our states, not the other way around. As a result, we not only have a huge variety of opinions strongly represented in this country, many of the more extreme opinions show up in state and local government even when not the majority opinion in the country. Thus we have an Oregon legalizing assisted suicide and marijuana while at the same time we have other states passing very restrictive abortion laws and some local governments taking actions like you describe. It is both a strength and weakness of the country.

It’s not the diversity of opinions that bothers me. Not at all. That’s absolutely positive. But censoring books – and classical literarure at that – and thus denying students the proper education because of misguided political/religious correctness is what I strongly object to. In the 1930s we burned books in Germany – and you know what happened later.